Notes On Content

Bits in salmon-pink are later additions, notes or further information supplied by others.

Bits in Khaki-green are 'work-in-progress' listings and anyone is welcome to add missing details, whether single items or whole chunks.

All photographs are 6.5 (old Fuji), 8.3 (Samsung) or 16 (new Nikon) Mpx, and most will blow up to greater than screen size if you hover on them and click. However I've noticed some of the older images aren't enlarging, this is probably a Blogger/Picasa/date/traffic/auto-archive thing?

If you think you can add some information, or identify any of the 'unknowns', please use the comment feature rather than emailing me.

Please report any dead links, and suggest any links you think should/could be added.

NoteI have now found out how to switch-off the slide-show thingy, so just clicking on the photographs will open them on a whole page where most will then enlarge further with another click - if the cursor is in a 'plus' sign.

This doesn't seem to work for some of the older posts, this is a Blogger/Internet coding change thing I can do nothing about, one day I'll update or replace the more important ones but that's years away.

Manufacturers A-Z

About Me

I’m a 51-year-old Aspergic CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play.

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Well, it's not even two weeks to the big
one! Last time I spoke to the editor - which was a while ago, there was still a
spare table left, so if you are thinking of trying selling (or want to display something
- it's a 'club meet' after all!), or if you have forgotten to book drop Plastic
Warrior a line now, before it's too late

For those thinking of travelling to the show,
here's the maps I did a few years ago, with birds-eye views for those who find
maps too cryptic! They are getting tired and cluttered so I will try to do some
more for the week before the show.

The venue has plenty of parking, a bar, and full
toilet facilities. Hot drinks, meals and snacks are served from quite early,
everything's on the ground floor and wheelchair friendly (apart from a couple
of stalls on the main stage) and it's the best show for rare, unusual and
especially British plastic figures - in the world!

Saturday, April 29, 2017

These were also hiding in the Timpo folder in the Timpo zone! And we
may have looked at some of it before? Maybe even all of it? Nevermattermind, it
will be of some interest to someone!

A group shot 'from the archive', none of
these are mine, but it shows two of the Timpolene
composition 'planes (believed to be made by Zang,
but here labelled to Timpo) and a pair
of the similar figures with what may be factory paint, but may be home-paint?

They (the figures) do keep turning-up in
different finishes and the trouble with the effort of trying to decide on the
decoration is exacerbated by the fact that the average hobbyist in
1940/50-something could daub a bit of gloss to the same level of competence as
the out-painters!

Also, this is another of those moments when you think it's fine to push back the date the experts have previously given to the 'stuff's usage, as that is an experimental Whittle 'plane is it not? A late war, not post war machine? The same machine to be seen (controversially) in fibreglass in Farnborough?

This is mine and I'm sure we've seen one of
these shots before, but there were two in the folder so I've collaged them
together; to tick a box, or 'tick them off'.

Zang's (or Timpo's?) 30mm
highlander in working/combat dress (with kilt!), possibly used as a whiskey
premium, maybe Haig (who Britains would work with later) or Dewars, and as
I said before; he's been broken cleanly at the ankles and glued back together.

I picked this up in Wilkinson's Basingrad
four weeks ago and can't remember how much I paid for it, but I know it wasn't
much or I wouldn't have bothered; maybe a couple of quid? £1:50? Something like
that, and it's fun!

Speedy Turbo Jet Wind-up Speed Boat, I've
placed a figure in it so you can see that it's fine for 54 or 60-mil figures
and would make a nice rigid-raider for your Airfix SAS or Vietnam forces! They
had a speedboat as well, and both came in two colour-ways.

A wind-up motor so it'll run round and around the
swimming pool - until you can sink it with an elastic superhero catapult!

Friday, April 28, 2017

I found a bunch of old photographs from about 10 years ago hiding in one of the Timpo folders on the dongle, so we'll be looking at them in the weeks to come, starting with these; the Timpo Mexican bandits from the wild west range.

The Mexicans came in three skin versions, brown (left hand figure above; late production?), a sort of pallid, sickly, zombie-flesh colour (right hand figure; early production?) and the standard Timpo pink (Friday production!?, I have no idea if there is any other significance (beyond being a vague dating aid) to this, but obviously the hands need to be matched to a same-colour head if you're building them up from bits, out of odd lots on evilBay!

The below shots were all taken at the same time while I was working for a Toy Dealer and were shot from a crate with several hundred figures in it, which had come-in from a hundred sources over the previous 15-odd years. It was obvious that while you will find various combinations of torso and legs, there were six 'standard' mixes, obviously from the main production batches, so I photographed a sample of them.

My favourite when we were kids, he's just gonna' do a bit o' killin' un robbin' on the way to the disco! Check-out those threads man - too cool for dance-school!

Another sharp-dressed man!

Note - standard pink hands on two of them.

This lot is the 'exception to the rule' having both brown or black holsters (at a 50/50'ish ratio), and a 'new' set of legs with a single holster, which I think are taken from the cowboy range?

They were all shot without heads as A) it would have taken all day to colour-match them all with the hands and B) there was no 'rule' as to the hats colour - the hats come in more that six colours, shades vary over time and sometimes they got the bandit head to boot - so they were going to be photographed separately (these were for another book project which never happened), something I don't seem to have got round to!

It don't get bluer than this, I can't remember where I picked this up, some evening train-fair in a school hall probably! But a fascinating 'artifactal' thing nonetheless.

It is basically crêpe plastic! A sheet of shopping-bag type polyethylene has been run though the paper crêpeing [spellcheck says 'crêpey'!] machine (interlocking-rollers?), probably with some heat in the mix, and when cooled you have a brilliant water surface for model railways, that glistens like you want to dive-in!

Thursday, April 27, 2017

I'm having a lazy week and this is supposed to be a post on Clifford and Guiterman-branded fire engines, but I haven't even sorted the images out, let alone got the text done (I was sorting the letter i's for the A-Z; 270+ and counting!), so here's something I picked-up in a discount store this week.

99p novelty from Tobar, isn't it fun! They come in blue as well! Nominally 54mm, you can make him 120mm - temporarily! Practical too - good for getting spiders in the top corners of a room!Contemporary; probably easier to find in Hawkin's Bazaar than a random high-street store (I was just lucky). That's it, the pictures say the rest; go, buy, have fun!

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Actually it's called a dump truck but hey!
I was raised to think a small 'puddle-jumper' was a tipper-truck and
'dumper-trucks' were to be found in quarries and on major road-works; despite
the double-axles and heavy cargo compartment, this is a little Ford puddle-jumper! Don't all write-in
- it's childhood versus semantics!

Looking a lot like some late Marx vehicles of the same type (but not
their dump truck which was a big, yellow, 'proper' one!) and various OK/Lucky types, it's actually branded to
one of those typical Hong Kong (or Japanese) logo's which could mean anything
if you don't know the company and while most Japanese companies have been
sorted, most HK ones haven't!

As with a lot of these Hong Kong toy
vehicles, the attempt to reproduce the functionality [in plastic] of their
[mostly metal] western counterparts led to lots of easily breakable small or
delicate parts, and while scaling-up helped somewhat, I'd hate to think how
much of Christmas would have passed before the tipping mechanism on this would
have been busted if it hadn't survived to the present day in its box?

Note that this toy's motor housing has the
brass eyelet-rivets, the same system found on the TAT bren-gun carrier I looked at here ages ago (I think? I know I
have one and I'm pretty sure it was Blogged!), TAT is another brand with a Lucky
cross-over, and like Lucky late TAT stuff is battery operated, but
re-branded to Stratco in their
packaging.

The brand-mark for the tipper, your choice
is as good as mine, although as the 'S' is smaller, I'm guessing we may be
limited to a choice of four; HIS, HSI, IHS or ISH! And - like TAT, the logo is on the base-plate as
well as the packaging.

Another 'anonymous' outfit only known as NN produced a two-axle version of this truck in various body-styles and with a heavy bumper/fender added at the front.

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

I've seen references to this company as
being Spanish, but as far as I know it was a Hong Kong maker or brand, shipping
to various markets one of which may well have been Spain? They have been linked
with both Lucky and Clifford (all three carrying the same
vehicles), but the links I posted the other day also suggest they produced a
range [their own?] of scale-ups from Lucky.

Just to be devious we will therefore look
at a third scale! This is as close to an OO -gauge compatible scale as makes no
difference and could be a copy of any British maker's; as it's such a
distinctive vehicle there were several 'original' models to copy from.

What I mean is; while it's easy to say all
versions of the Humber 1-ton truck are ultimately copies of Dinky, as Dinky were the only firm to make a decent version of a vehicle
which in 'real-life' never went on to have a large run or become a service
vehicle, the London bus was so iconic everybody made one . . . or two! And
providing the windows are in the right place, the roof sections, 'lines' and so
on properly modeled - in scale - there's no way of telling who the 'donor' was.
There's a very real chance it was based on the Tudor Rose plastic version - it all seems to be in the bonnet (is
this one a Leyland?), the bodywork rarely differs greatly.

Again, this has the fold-back tabs holding
the motor-housing in place that yesterday's VW Beetle had (except I'm loading
this the same day the Beetle publishes - which I loaded last week - but for you
it's 'yesterday's'!), this is not necessarily a big clue, but it's one of those
identifiers which help place these toys (of which there were hundreds) in
groups to build a better picture of the HK toy industry and its supply-chain
relationships.

The other main variant is the four brass
(or 'brassed' (brass-anodised) - some of them rust!) eyelet-rivets, with others
having screws, small slot-head bolts, or solid aluminium rivets

I think the model code was No.454, but it's not as clear a picture
as I hoped! This is not a typical Lucky
code (they were 1xx, 1xxA, 30xx, 50xx, 70xx, and 6xxxx for combined sets), but
as the Telsalda box code is B5046
(closer to a Lucky code!) there's the
usual lack of clarity there - that one expects from Hong Kong! Was 5046 a Lucky bus, leaving 'B' as the contract
code for Telsalda?

Telsalda did another version of a Routemaster bus with larger bonnet/engine
(Daimler?) but otherwise the same configuration of windows, roof &etc. It
had clear windows, yellow seating and a driver, this (probably later) model has
blue tinted windows hiding the fact that it’s hollow!

Monday, April 24, 2017

We're going to look at a few of the
vehicles I photographed at Sandown Park last month which may (or may not!) be
from the Lucky Toy (or LP!) stable/s over the next few days,
and we’re starting with a little peach!

I used to be a big fan of VW Beetles and
some of my friends still are, but I saw the light . . . here's the news; all
vehicles even back in the 1950's have/had a built-in obsolescence, and while a
15 or even 20 year-old vehicle can be a cool conversation piece, a 30 or 40
year old bubble-car with a propensity to catch-fire on the motorway, is just an
old piece of shit - isn't it?!

Same with old-series Land Rovers (aluminium
rot), 1950's Harley Davidson's (noisy, gas-guzzling, rust-buckets), any pretty
Citroens (hydraulic nightmare), Morris Traveller's and Mini-traveller's; they
get woodworm in their bodywork FFS! Old vehicles look best (and last longer) in
museums, period.

Clear base mark with the full Lucky horseshoe. Points to note are that
the motor housing has bend-down tin flaps, and while there are two screw
stations, only one is being used, suggesting other variations, probably for
other/different customers with different wheel or bodywork arrangements or even
different motor-types/configurations?

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Not so much 'loose-ends' as just a few
figures to be added to last month's posts; there's plenty more to be added to
the subject before we get to loose-ends, I'm sure!

I suggested in the past posts that
I had another Marx made-in-HK road
worker here, in fact I seem to have two, but not the one I was thinking of! I
do have a full set in storage ('so we will return . . . ' etc...etc...), but
for now here's another two!

I was originally told these (the set, not
the two) were prototypes which never went into production, but actually both
the figures and the dump truck they are known to have come with (among others)
are quite common, I think the speaker was talking of the particular boxing he
had, which may have been among the tranche of unique Swansea-factory design/art-shop
stuff which came-up at auction about 20 years ago?

While they may be common, the detailing is
fine and because they are hard, brittle styrene, they are often damaged,
particularly the chap on the left who is usually missing his hammer and a
similar pick-axe armed guy.

Speaking of Marx, I've used their Disney
dog to scale this addition to the 'probably' Blue Box 50/52mm road workers we also looked at the other day.
He looks as if he's been designed to hold something, and may well be a
stand-alone figure, possibly a delivery driver for a larger sized Blue Box vehicle? But - he's from the
same family as the road workers and in the same pink-plastic, with the same
base mark as the ACW and Wild West.

CliffordFire Engine crew, these
are the larger size of HK push-and-go vehicle at around 1:24th scale, with the
driver (not a terribly clear shot - sorry) having his arms up at the wheel, the
other crewman being a more static pose.

Of a similar size to the firemen is this
chap on the left, possibly from a towed boat? There are several towed boats in
the HK push-and-go vehicle universe as anyone who followed the links to Planet Die-cast last time, will know.
Equally; he could be an ambulance or police vehicle driver?

Next to him is the Blue Box copy of the Dinky
farm tractor/combined-harvester driver in hard plastic, while the right-hand
shot shows him again with a soft plastic copy of Corgi's similar tractor driver. There are many verstions of the Corgi guy, in hard, soft and vinyl
plastic, several from Corgi
themselves who were sourcing in Hong Kong, we may have looked at them a while
ago, we will return to them one day!

Notes on Below Index

For those not used to Blogger, the below 'index' allows you to find similar posts by their content, just click on the label (word) that best suits you search needs. I have tried to label by

- Country of origin of toy- Country represented by toy- Maker- Material- Scale/Size/Ratio- Era represented by toy- Whether subject is civil/military- Other 'themes'Etc...

Re-annotating the index is an ongoing project, in the meantime to save on space (there is a limit on the number of characters and the number of labels) I have started using abbreviations, which are as follows:

Copyright (C) Hugh Walter 2009-2014

The moral and legal right of Hugh Walter to be identified as the author of these works (excepting the layout and code supplied by Blogger/Blogspot and/or their agents) is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This blog presents images and text subject to the condition that the authored contents shall not, by way of trade or otherwise be lent, sold, hired-out or otherwise circulated publicly in any form, nor should any part of these works be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system (other than the servers of Blogger/Blogspot and/or Google and/or their nominated agents) or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, other than being downloaded by an individual for his own private use and not for subsequent re-publishing in any form whatsoever.

Any individual wishing to re-publish an image should obtain the authors permission by eMail beforehand, stating destination of image and context within which the image is required.